The edit listings for your subscribed entities (and subscribed editors) now shows all edits entered within the past 7 days, by default (so, auto-edits are now visible, plus edits that may have passed by vote before you saw them). There’s a new toggle-able option on the page to only display open edits, to restore the previous behavior while voting. We’ll hopefully introduce some way to mark closed edits as reviewed/dismissed soon, to make the listings easier to digest.

Edit histories for large collections should hopefully load a bit faster now. Please comment on MBS-8368 if you have a collection that still consistently times out when viewing its edit history.

We’ve also made a slight change to our release process. Previously, our master branch was our “stable” branch which pointed to the most recent release (i.e., the code we run on musicbrainz.org itself). If this is what you expect, you should now be using the production branch instead. The master branch has become our main development branch, which means it may be slightly less stable from now on (of course, we’ll do our best to avoid that).

Thanks to Ulrich Klauer (chirlu) for his contributions to today’s release.

I am pleased to announce that I’ve just hired our first person responsible for looking after the day-to-day business operations of MetaBrainz! Christina Smith, a Canadian who also lives in Barcelona, has signed on as our part-time Business Development Guru (/Manager/Troublemaker/What have you).

This marks a significant step forward for us in a number of ways. First, it acknowledges that we have grown enough to warrant such a position. Second, Christina will improve how we communicate with customers and how much revenue we bring into the foundation. In the last two years we’ve added several new projects, but haven’t been able to hire new engineers to work on these projects, so hopefully having Christina will allow us to grow to support our new projects as well.

increase revenues by connecting and building relationships with current and potential supporters

general accounting tasks including invoicing and payment tracking

periodic research, recommendations and help to address evolving business needs. (e.g. research the implementation of a company presence in Europe, including help in setting up a new headquarter in Barcelona)

research and suggestions on law and policy issues related to the business

I am super excited that Christina will be working with us — this removes a pile of tasks off my plate, which should allow me to focus more on running the foundation and managing our teams.

For the remainder of December, Christina will work on research tasks on how we can establish a better base in the EU. Then in January she will properly join the team and be present in our IRC meetings.

Today we’ve deployed a new build of the search server code. As you may know, we’ve been having loads of issues with our search servers recently.

In an effort to figure out what causes the bizarre behaviour we’ve observed, we compiled a new version of the codebase with a more recent version of Lucene. In theory this makes no feature changes to the codebase, but you never know if that is actually the case.

We hope that this build will be more stable, but we’ll need to observe over the next few days to see if that will be the case. If you spot any problems, please report them in our SEARCH bug tracker.